Thanks to my enjoyable words, I had an enjoyable brainstorming process, which I thought about awkward personal situations requiring privacy.. I focused on phone calls. We have many phone calls during a day and during many of them we could rarely find a private space to talk on phone. My idea is to create a surrounding speaker and mic product which allows user to have phone calls in public. This product helps users to hide their chats from the others.
I tried to reach a futuristic and simple form with my initial sketches.
I built some mock-ups to try these ideas. My intention was to create a headphone which can be rotated when privacy is needed. In order to create a tight headphone which sits on the ears I used aluminum wires. The result was not satisfying because the device fell down.
Then I tried to find a simple form that sits on the shoulders and close all the surroundings of the mouth. This simple cylindrical form is more helpful to absorb the human voice.
Before making the final prototype, I visited Chinatown to find some material sources and got this sponge foam from “Canal Rubber” which is located at 329 Canal St. In order to find the fabric I visited W 37th st. There are several fabric sellers.
My awkward privacy device concept is a mouth surrounding headphone with a microphone integrated to it. The user plug it to his/her phone and then be able to have private calls in public.
